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No, no, I haven’t finished writing the romance novel. I just thought it would be nice to let you know what’s going on in that world. I’m also hoping it helps keep me accountable with my writing if I have to update you every month. I’d hate to get to May and have to report that nothing much has happened.
How embarrassing!
So far, I’ve written 41,210 words and am nearly at the half-way point. I’m happy to report that they’re mostly good words, too. Maybe not great words—yet—but I haven’t gotten to the editing stage, so I don’t expect them to be great just yet.
I’m taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo for the month of April, which has really helped my word count. I’m about 17,000 words in so far this month, which is more than double what I had going into April. If you aren’t familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The full NaNoWriMo happens in November with the goal to write 50,000 words, but each April and July, the organization holds “camps” where you can join and write whatever you need to. I set a goal of 30,000 words, figuring I could manage 1,000 words most days and that would get me close to the end of this draft. So far, so good!
You may not know this, but this is my second attempt at drafting a manuscript for Only with You. I finished the first draft in mid-2018. But it was, well, it was awful. No sense in sugar coating it. There was no conflict, no character arc, just a bunch of words on a page (over 80,000 to be precise). That’s okay, though. Failing at that draft taught me what not to do, and I’m mostly avoiding these same mistakes this time around, so I view that as a success.
Will it be a perfect draft when I’m finished? Hardly. But it will be closer than I’ve ever been before, and that feels good. There will be more rewriting and editing to follow, but I’m confident that this is the draft that will take me all the way to The End and finally giving Livy and Cole their Happily Ever After. They’ve been waiting a long time for it!
And just to whet your appetite, here’s the opening paragraph:
And they lived Happily Ever After. The end.
